Residency Dates
7 January –
2 February 2025
Artist Images
Residency Images
Testimonial
"What an exhilarating way to start 2025: a month a Xenia Creative Retreat.
Xenia took me on a wild journey from snowy winter trails, to warm spring soil, budding trees and flowers, then back to icy storms in mad rain. The colours were rich in their bleakness and pigment presented itself everywhere: overly matured berries, green-earth soil, bark, rosehip, rust. A similar wild journey was felt within: the solitude was daunting at times, the uninterrupted working hours were glorious and time for reflection presented itself with new ideas.
All in the excellent company of artists Michelle and Pam, along with guests, family and Xenia. I feel anew.
Thank you, Bianca and the Xenia team, for your warmth, generosity and kindness. I’m forever grateful."
Bio
Born
Sweden
About
Anna Blom is a Swedish-born, London-based artist who holds an MA in Painting (Arts and Humanities) from the Royal College of Art (2022) and a BFA in Painting from UAL Wimbledon (2020).
Anna’s practice contemplates the diaristic, each piece acting as a response to her environment and emotional state at any given moment. Her semi-abstract paintings, which she describes as “observational portraits”, contain traces of her continuous research; an archival process of investigating how individuals connect, combine and construct themselves through collecting objects, matter, white noise and writing. Drawing on this material, the artist deconstructs the fragile details of daily life in each piece, allowing transient forms to allude to the physical and psychological components of her lived experience.
Her works also act as records of the environment in which they were created - Blom lays the unstretched canvas out in the open, exposed to the elements, and paints with raw pigment while allowing situational debris to fall upon the surface. The resultant textured, gritty and matt surfaces speak to the moment they were created, reflecting seasonality, weather conditions, and the artist's shifting emotional landscape.
Deliberately ephemeral, her paintings tell personal stories and share fragments of a “painted philosophy”; a way of manifesting the complexity of human experience as an emotionally rich, transient and vulnerable state.
Anna's work has been featured in group exhibitions by galleries and curatorial projects including Apsara Studio (2024) Vortic, London (2024); Studio West, London (2024); Gertrude and Canopy Collections, London (2024); Flowers Gallery, London (2023); Hautes Côtes, Apsara Studio and Sotheby's, Burgundy (2023); Liminal Gallery, Margate (2023); OHSH Projects, London (2023); Aora and Apsara Studio, London (2023); Ovada Gallery, Oxford (2023) and Orleans House Gallery, London (2022) among others.
For more information about Anna, please visit her website here: www.bloominghell.com
Residency Dates
7 January –
2 February 2025
Artist Images
Residency images
Testimonial
"What an exhilarating way to start 2025: a month a Xenia Creative Retreat.
Xenia took me on a wild journey from snowy winter trails, to warm spring soil, budding trees and flowers, then back to icy storms in mad rain. The colours were rich in their bleakness and pigment presented itself everywhere: overly matured berries, green-earth soil, bark, rosehip, rust. A similar wild journey was felt within: the solitude was daunting at times, the uninterrupted working hours were glorious and time for reflection presented itself with new ideas.
All in the excellent company of artists Michelle and Pam, along with guests, family and Xenia. I feel anew.
Thank you, Bianca and the Xenia team, for your warmth, generosity and kindness. I’m forever grateful."
About
Anna Blom is a Swedish-born, London-based artist who holds an MA in Painting (Arts and Humanities) from the Royal College of Art (2022) and a BFA in Painting from UAL Wimbledon (2020).
Anna’s practice contemplates the diaristic, each piece acting as a response to her environment and emotional state at any given moment. Her semi-abstract paintings, which she describes as “observational portraits”, contain traces of her continuous research; an archival process of investigating how individuals connect, combine and construct themselves through collecting objects, matter, white noise and writing. Drawing on this material, the artist deconstructs the fragile details of daily life in each piece, allowing transient forms to allude to the physical and psychological components of her lived experience.
Her works also act as records of the environment in which they were created - Blom lays the unstretched canvas out in the open, exposed to the elements, and paints with raw pigment while allowing situational debris to fall upon the surface. The resultant textured, gritty and matt surfaces speak to the moment they were created, reflecting seasonality, weather conditions, and the artist's shifting emotional landscape.
Deliberately ephemeral, her paintings tell personal stories and share fragments of a “painted philosophy”; a way of manifesting the complexity of human experience as an emotionally rich, transient and vulnerable state.
Anna's work has been featured in group exhibitions by galleries and curatorial projects including Apsara Studio (2024) Vortic, London (2024); Studio West, London (2024); Gertrude and Canopy Collections, London (2024); Flowers Gallery, London (2023); Hautes Côtes, Apsara Studio and Sotheby's, Burgundy (2023); Liminal Gallery, Margate (2023); OHSH Projects, London (2023); Aora and Apsara Studio, London (2023); Ovada Gallery, Oxford (2023) and Orleans House Gallery, London (2022) among others.
For more information about Anna, please visit her website here: www.bloominghell.com
© 2020 Xenia Creative Retreat | Hampshire, UK
© 2020 Xenia Creative Retreat | Hampshire, UK